NURTURES: Longitudinal Summary of Project Impact on Students' Mathematics, Reading, & Science Learning

Because standardized tests in science are not given to PreK-3 students in Ohio, this report examined the longitudinal effects of learning from a teacher who had participated in the NURTURES professional development program. Specifically, it looked at the effects on students' mathematics and reading learning in grades 2-5 and science learning in 5th grade in 2017. Students who were in 5th grade at that time could have had a NURTURES-trained teacher at any time between kindergarten and 3rd grade. Thus, the study followed students up to 5 years after having a NURTURES teacher. The sample included the population of students enrolled in the 41 elementary schools in the Toledo Public School District. Students who never learned from a teacher who participated in NURTURES served as the control group. The data came from the 2017 administration of the Ohio Measure of Academic Progress (MAP) (NWEA, 2019) for mathematics and reading and the Ohio Achievement Test in Science for science (Ohio Achievement Assessment, 2015). The total number of students from these schools who took the May 2017 reading MAP was 6759 and the total number who took mathematics was 6703. The number of those students who had at least one NURTURES teacher was 2801 (41.4%) for reading and 2707 (41.6%) for mathematics. Analysis of the reading scores showed 2.14 advantage points for NURTURES students as compared to the average non-intervention student to an annual growth rate of 7.02 units (p < .001). The treatment effect size (Hedges' g) was 0.12. For mathematics there were 1.55 advantage points to an annual growth rate estimated to be 8.17 units (p < .001) as compared to the average non-intervention student. The treatment effect size (Hedges' g) was 0.09. Analysis of the 5th grade Ohio Achievement Science Subtest showed that students associated with at least one NURTURES-trained teacher was modeled to have a 5.86 advantage points as compared to the average non-intervention student. The treatment effect size (Hedges' g) was 0.08, which is to be interpreted as a treatment group having, on average, 0.08 higher scores in standard deviation units as compared to the scores of the control cohort. When compared with our earlier evaluation report (2016; revised in 2018), we see that students who had a NURTURES-trained teacher, on average, continued to show greater gains compared to students who did not. In addition, the achievement gaps between non-minority and minority students in reading and mathematics were reduced when the minority students had a NURTURES-trained teacher and the non-minority students did not. In science, the impact of the intervention roughly compensated for the attainment gap between boys and girls and partially ameliorated the gap between minority and non-minority children's scores associated with these demographic factors. [Published May 6, 2020 with minor revisions based in WWC inquiries published January 5, 2024.]